> it’s needed and the next president will be glad to have it, instead of doing large official gatherings in tents.
This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress.
> Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.
The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.
There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However, if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when that person is actively working on official acts that directly impact you.
The crazy thing is that if you are a low rank Congress staffer or other government employee, the anti corruption rules are actually quite strict. It only loosens up the higher you go.
Totally agree. For the average federal employee there are (or at least were) a huge amount of checks in place to weed out corruption. That was sort of the entire point of the inspectors general, to track down and weed out fraud and corruption.
Even for the FBI and most of the other police agencies there was a decent amount of checks in place to make sure they weren't acting out of pocket. It's ICE and the CIA that have had much less restrictions.
This may be true, it's simply the way that it's approached that has my hackles up. This is something that should have been provisioned and approved by congress.
> Separately, raising money through corporate “donations” seems like a huge loophole for corruption.
The US corruption laws are laughably bad. You don't even need this sort of loophole other than to avoid reporting on who's doing the donations.
There's basically nothing that really prevents someone from giving a Justice, Senator, congress person, or the president a yacht, airplane, home, or a "loan" that gets forgiven. The only real limits is that's supposed to be reported (and that foreign governments can't do the same). Yes yes, the bribery law states that you can't pay someone to perform an official act. However, if you simply give them a gift that doesn't count. Even when that person is actively working on official acts that directly impact you.